Technical Appendix to Air Demand in a Dynamic Competitive Context with the Automobile (2019)

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

26 CHAPTER 3. DEFINING CORRIDORS WHERE MODES COMPETE 3(A) MARKETS UNDER 800 MILES IN DISTANCE Chapter 3 of this Technical Appendix now examines the top intercity markets where air travel and the automobile compete: the distance of 800 miles reflects the maximum length of a one-day drive. Data collected in the project’s 2017 survey shows that 85% of those on a two-day driving trip are driving about 600 miles per day; this suggests that 800 miles represents a very cautious cap on the length of the one-day trip for most drivers. The research team has defined the top ‘one-day’ markets as follows. The NAS Committee (for which RSG served as the traffic data consultant) focused on trips between 100 and 500 miles. Later refinements of the same FHWA trip tables explored the possible role of buses for some corridors, defined as core-based statistical area (CBSA) to CBSA. For that study, it was determined that buses would not be a viable alternative for trips of over 1,000 miles in length. It was further determined that corridors with no reported bus service were not good candidates for inclusion in the top 200 markets. Corridors were only calculated for the 48 contiguous states. The FWHA bus ridership study explains how the 200 markets were defined: For this project, the top 200 markets were defined based on the total number of the long- distance trips (all four modes combined), with some additional restrictions. A top market, in this study, is the total two-way passenger travel demand between a pair of zones. The project team selected the zoning system of CBSAs. A CBSA is typically an aggregation of multiple counties. Using a County-CBSA look up table, the original county-to-county OD trip tables produced during an interim step of the TAF Multimodal Interregional Passenger Travel Origin Destination Data project were aggregated into a total of 443,211 pairs of CBSA that have distances between them of greater than 100 miles. For each pair of CBSAs (A and B), a total market demand is the summation of the trips from A to B and trips from B to A. 439,588 pairs of CBSAs have at least one trip between the zones. (FHWA Bus study report.) The trip tables were revised during analysis performed for the FHWA bus project, which also defined top markets by total trips by all modes between areas for all markets under 1,000 miles. This research project has examined these markets in search of an air mode share over 2%. (The use of 2% resulted in fewer outlier patterns than 1%.) This research project also posited that people would not drive more than 800 miles in one day, erring on the side of including more corridors into the tables. Figure 3-1 shows all prime market corridors that meet this definition and where the air mode is a viable alternative to a one-day trip via automobile for city pairs over 100 miles in length. The research team found only 68 of such city pairs in the national system where air is a direct competitor to the automobile. Figure 3-1 presents these city pairs ranked by total travel by all modes.

27 FIGURE 3-1: STUDY CORRIDORS RANKED, BY TOTAL TRAFFIC VOLUME Source: Research Team, based data from Federal Highway Administration Bus Study.

28 RANKED BY MODE SHARE TO AIR TABLE 3-1: STUDY CITY-PAIR MARKETS OF 100–800 MILES, RANKED BY AIR MODE SHARE ABOVE 2% CORRIDOR (HIGHER RANK) AIR SHARE DISTANCE (MILES) CORRIDOR (LOWER RANK) AIR SHARE DISTANCE (MILES) Chicago/NYC 91% 725 Chicago/ Louisville 24% 273 Chicago/Dallas-FW 89% 785 NYC/Rochester 24% 235 Dallas-FW/Denver 89% 660 Miami/Tampa 23% 199 Denver/Las Vegas 89% 605 Dallas-FW/Tulsa 23% 232 Atlanta/NYC 88% 746 Austin/Dallas-FW 21% 198 Atlanta/Dallas-FW 84% 724 Chicago/Cincinnati 17% 264 Atlanta/Chicago 83% 590 Phoenix/Riverside 16% 300 Atlanta/Philadelphia 82% 661 NYC/Richmond 16% 292 Chicago/DC 82% 599 Boston/NYC 15% 204 Charlotte/NYC 79% 529 NYC/Norfolk 13% 290 Atlanta/DC 79% 529 Atlanta/Charlotte 12% 232 Detroit/NYC 67% 486 Miami Orlando 12% 182 LA/Bay Area 66% 363 Kansas City/St. Louis 12% 228 Chicago/Kansas City 64% 399 NYC/DC 11% 219 Atlanta/Orlando 63% 393 NYC/Syracuse 10% 191 Boston/DC 61% 419 Brownsville/Houston 9% 288 LA/San Jose 60% 294 Reno /Bay Area 9% 188 LA/Sacramento 58% 375 Houston/San Antonio 8% 195 LA/Phoenix 57% 364 Houston/McAllen 7% 296 Detroit/DC 56% 406 Austin/Houston 6% 148 Houston/New Orleans 53% 318 Pittsburgh DC 6% 178 Chicago/Minneapolis 51% 349 Chicago/Indianapolis 6% 173 Las Vegas/Phoenix 50% 276 Dallas-FW/Oklahoma City 6% 185 Las Vegas/LA 49% 227 Corpus Christi/Houston 6% 180 Dallas-FW/San Antonio 37% 255 Jacksonville/Tampa 5% 151 Philadelphia/Pittsburgh 36% 246 Atlanta/ Nashville 4% 217 NYC/Pittsburgh 32% 304 Baltimore/Norfolk 4% 157 Buffalo/NYC 31% 288 Brownsville/San Antonio 4% 241 Dallas-FW/Houston 30% 231 Albuquerque/El Paso 3% 219 Chicago/St. Louis 29% 249 Philadelphia/Norfolk 3% 209 Chicago/Detroit 28% 255 NYC/Worcester 3% 160 Phoenix/San Diego 28% 307 Portland/Seattle 3% 141 Jacksonville/Miami 27% 292 Philadelphia/Richmond 3% 207 Boston/Philadelphia 25% 289 Baltimore/NYC 2% 167

29 RANKED BY NUMBER OF ANNUAL TRIPS BY ALL MODES Figure 3-1 shows that there are only 18 city pairs in this limited database that generate more than 2 million long-distance trips per corridor in the base year of 2008. The scale of these corridors is important, but relatively small variations in definitions could change the number of city pairs listed in Figure 3-1. The Great Circle Route distance from New York’s City Hall to Philadelphia’s City Hall is 81 Miles via Google Maps. Distance between the two cities (derived from Google Maps) by I-95 is 98 miles—making it a potential candidate for consideration in a study of distances around 100 miles. In short, this information is presented here only for illustrative purposes. New York City/Philadelphia (NYC/PHL) would emerge as the single largest intercity pair corridor in the United States with a slightly different set of definitions. If it had been included, the NYC/PHL volume would report approximately 19 million interregional trips, with an air share of 3%. At a 90-mile distance, LA/San Diego would comprise approximately 21 million interregional trips, with no air share reported and thus not a candidate by this criterion either. Another 32 city pairs are reported with travel volumes between one million and two million annual trips. An additional 18 city-pair markets are reported with volumes of one million and under. Thus, there are at least 68 corridors between 100 and 500 miles in length in the 48 continuous states with air mode shares exceeding 2%. AIR MODE SHARE, BY DISTANCE—CHART FORMAT The relationship between trip distance and air mode share shown in Table 3-1 can be depicted in graph format, as shown in Figure 3-2. FIGURE 3-2: AIR MODE SHARE AS FUNCTION OF DISTANCE, FOR THE “ONE-DAY DRIVE” CITY PAIRS Source: Table 3-1. 3(B) EXAMPLES OF THE SCALE OF TRIP-MAKING OVER 800 MILES The longest distances included in the research team’s analysis include trips that might be made by automobile in one (long) day, including descriptions of distances for Chicago/New York and 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 Ai r M od e Sh ar e Distance (Great Circle)

30 Chicago/Dallas that are over 700 miles, both with air mode shares around 90%. As noted above, not many drivers go more than 800 miles in a single segment. The scale of very-long-distance trip-making is explored in subsequent phases of this research project. However, a sense of scale can also be gained by examining a small set of long-distance air volumes, which are empirically reported (as opposed to modeled). A new trip table has been created by the research team for the subsequent study of airport choice in multi-airport settings, which—as an example—will examine air volumes from all the airports in the Los Angeles area to all the airports in the New York area. Examples of metro region-to-metro region air passenger flows include: NYC/LA, at 4.4 million air passengers; NYC/Bay Area, at 3.1 air passengers; LA/Chicago, at 2.7 million air passengers; and Chicago to all the airports competing with Boston/Logan, at 2.3 million air passengers. Current data suggest that each of these air volumes will be associated with automobile volumes that result in automobile mode shares between 3% and 5%.